William Bundy dissects the Nixon years, politely

Everyone in the state department is trying to knife me in the back, except for Bill Bundy," Henry Kissinger grumbled after becoming Nixon's National Security Adviser. "He is still enough of a gentleman to knife me in the chest." So true, even now. In his new book, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (Hill and Wang; 647 pages; $35), the patrician Bundy is still inserting the knife in a gentle, gentlemanly way. His title comes from Sir Walter Scott's lines about the "tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive." In assessing Nixon...